Homie, I'm sorry but open world really just means its one map and it implies you might be able to go anywhere on the horizon. Rain World has an open world, Elder Scrolls definitely does except for Arena, pretty much any MMO, Astroneer, your OLD GAME No Man's Sky is open world. Seriously take a step back from your own project and breath for 4 hours before making announcements. That being said, Light No Fire looks ridiculously good and I can't wait for it.
I think they're just talking about the game being open world in a full planet that you can clearly see is a planet and is large and diverse enough to actually feel like a full planet.
Still not the first at that either. Valheim for example is a round planet and open world and has several biomes. But there the world isn't really impressive, so maybe that's what they are trying to be the first of?
Based on the trailer they are clearly trying to be the first game to actually achieve something but it's hard to define what that something really is.
Arena is one of the most open world of TES games. You can go anywhere in Tamriel. That said, it's fairly limited with what it can do, but it's so much more open than later games. Daggerfall is similar, except it got limited to one region.
IMO, on the Game Awards where it was announced, he looked extremely nervous to say much of anything. And he seemed like he was trying to downplay what the game has with his comments on it being a small team working on it. Which I don't blame him.
Yeah I sure hope they've learned from NMS and specifically underpromise and overdeliver, but most nervousness can be explained by him just being an introverted dork. I can relate.
I put something like 500 hours into No Man's Sky at various points (PC and PS4pro). It was fun! I've moved on. But if they get anywhere near that with Light No Fire, I'll be buying in once again :)
I don't think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they've put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.
But is it procgen as you go? Or did they procgen a whole map, which exists from start for you to explore?
Because the latter is very cool, but the verbage around it so far feels like they mean the former, and Ive no clue how that would work with what theyre claiming the game is.
There have been plenty of other open world games years before Minecraft existed. Elite 1984, Legend of Zelda on the NES, Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind. Etc.
The term itself just hasn't been around that long.